This blog exists to support liberatory collectivist activism that is anti-patriarchy, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. It also seeks to center the experiences, theories, and agendas of radical and feminist women of color.

Monday, February 11, 2013

As a kind of personal-political preface to the interview that follows, I'd like to explain why it is I find the exchange so significant.

It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with my blog that I strongly believe women of color are the global leaders in feminism, as well as regional and national leaders in many places, and ought to be regarded as such by whites and men. Typically, men and whites ignore, silence, marginalise, appropriate, and take credit for the activist work women of color do.

If you take the spotlight off the courageous leadership work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., you see a lot of Black women in leadership throughout the 20th century in the U.S., working very hard, at great cost, to free African Americans from the blight of white supremacy while also addressing sexual politics and male supremacy. Black men's work against racism has been substantial and has also tended to de-center or invisibilise Black women's insights, analysis, and activism. White women's feminist work against sexism and male supremacy has been substantial and ground-breaking in countries where white women live. And it has been a challenge to get the whiteness of the work de-centered or even consistently identified as race-privileged.

My own family background led me to be particularly concerned about sexual
violence. For several years, I was drawn to a few white feminist writers who
focused on that issue intensely but usually non-intersectionally, and without
radically and thoroughly identifying the whiteness in their work. At the same time, thanks to a white lesbian feminist mentor, I was introduced to the work of many womanist and feminist writers of color, mostly from North America and the Caribbean. My own awareness of the work done by women of color outside of white-ruled or white-colonised nations was minimal. Over the last few years I have tried to make this blog a space where voices, perspectives, and commitments to radical social change by women of color are highlighted not footnoted; where women of color are centralised not marginalised.

I do this in part because of once mistakenly determining white work to be the most radical; this was done in part because whites who use the term 'radical' don't identify lack of awareness of their whiteness as anti-radical. This was consistently challenged by radical women of color writer-activists as anti-revolutionary, racist practice. I also noticed far too many white-edited, white-dominated anthologies of activists where women of color got a special chapter on women effected by racial hierarchies (as if white people aren't fundamentally effected by white supremacy and racism), but were rarely invited or expected to speak on behalf of all women. I've seen white pro-radical and feminist websites where the work of women of color is barely mentioned and where white women routinely speak for all women. I've seen gatherings led by whites who pretend they are inclusive and safe for women of color.

Writings and activism which centers the humanity of women is generally and typically regarded by men as being too narrowly about women. Men's writings about only-men or mostly men has been historically regarded by men as about all of humanity, or the segment of humanity worth doing justice work for, or about all people of a particular race; it is rarely-to-never seen as "too narrow in scope", too much about men, too ignorant about women, when reviewed by other men. When men recount the contributions by women to the men's human struggles for justice, women have too often been ignored or footnoted. And when men focus on women, the gaze is often objectifying and the attitude patronising.

It appears that whites and men will not easily regard women of color as
fully human with perspectives that whites and men ought to
pay attention to, prioritise, privilege, promote, and regard as foundational and central to understanding
humanity on the whole.

I have come to the conclusion that women of color, as a global and regional majority by gender and the most diversely raced women on Earth, hold the most complex, radical, sophisticated, and revolutionary views on race, gender, and everything else. This doesn't mean I don't still look to white women and men of color for useful analysis and insight. It means I no longer center and privilege their voices and perspectives.

Vandana Shiva is, for me, a profoundly important world leader on matters of feminism, environmental/Earth justice, global economics, and holistic and humane sustainability. Robin Morgan is a U.S.-based white feminist who has dedicated many decades to the struggle by and for women against men's global woman-hating and woman-subjugating violence. I hold both women in very high regard and was delighted to find this exchange between them recently online.

Dr. Vandana Shiva—The New Delhi Rape and Globalization

Dr. Vandana Shiva, economist, environmentalist, and feminist, spoke
of the public outcry in India and how the devaluing of women in a
global economy set the stage for the New Delhi rape. Adapted from a conversation broadcast last month on Women's Media Center Live with Robin Morgan.

Robin Morgan: In a feminist analysis certainly, everything is connected to everything else. You recently wrote a stunning piece
about the ghastly gang rape in New Delhi and the subsequent
demonstrations and how violence against women and the economy were all
connected. I’d love you, please, to talk about the points that you
raised.

Vandana Shiva: I’ve been working on how the economy’s
changing—globalization, free trade, WTO, the structural adjustment. I’ve
made the connections between those purposes and what happens to women
in what is called the New Economy. They even call it the Emerging
Economy, as if a 10,000-year-old civilization emerges only when it is
locked into corporate globalization.

The first level at where violence against women begins is in the very
defining of the economy. Economy means household. It is what women
define both inside the physical households, but also the world, inside
the planet as the household. As long as the principles of management
came out of that, they focused on sustenance, livelihoods, mutual
giving—of course, within the typical patriarchies all our societies have
had.

[With] free trade globalization, the first thing they do is knock out
that major sector of women’s economy and, as Marilyn Waring has written
in If Women Counted, install a production boundary to calculate growth.

The Gross Domestic Product grows every time you can pull something out
of nature and something out of women customers’ economy, which means
every time you destroy nature and women’s livelihoods, and production,
and creativity, you can call it growth. It’s created to mobilize
finances for the war, and it becomes the dominant number imposed on our
world.

I’ve been appointed by the King of Bhutan to an expert group we’ve
created because Gross Domestic Product is the wrong measure. The King
of Bhutan said we should be looking at the well-being of our people to
measure Gross National Happiness.

At this time, growth measured as Gross Domestic Product is already
collapsing world-wide. It collapsed with Wall Street. It’s collapsing
in Europe right now in front of our eyes. and it will collapse in India
after a few years. How long can you sustain an eight or nine percent
growth that excludes women as the primary backbone of the economy? That
is the first violence.

The second violence is in terms of decision-making and politics. In so
many debates in India we hear, “Oh, we can’t have politics in
economics.” But every time they make a decision within a patriarchal
model of the economy, it is politics. It’s politics that basically
says, “Only corporations count, only the powerful count, and we’re going
to mutate democracy from being, “By the people, of the people, for the
people,” into being “By the corporations, of the corporations, for the
corporations—and the powerful.”

The convergence of economic and political power further excludes women,
but it also creates a class with immunity and impunity, which can do
all levels of violence, change laws, and remove protections. There’s
rape at every level—rape of the earth, rape of our resources, rape of
the economy, and rape of women, which is what this drastic, dramatic
tragedy has woken up India to.

Then there are other levels of violence because displaced people are
more vulnerable. I was asked by the National Commission of Women to
grapple with what globalization was doing to women in India, in terms of
two key factors: water, and food and agriculture. At public hearings
around the country, whether in Calcutta or down south, women would speak
out boldly about how sexual violence has increased and made them more
vulnerable as they were being made economic and ecological refugees.

That is at the very foundation of this new liberal model: everything is
a commodity. Everything is property. Everything has a price and
nothing has value. Added to the traditional patriarchies of societies,
that's created what I call a super-virus of patriarchy. When two viruses
hybridize, they start to kill.

Basically it’s a bit like climate change. We’ve had cyclones, but
Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy present a different level of
violence. Of course, we know that this is contributed by climate
change. We need to start looking at how an economy based on patriarchal
fictions—and the corporation is the biggest patriarch in our lives to
come—how this patriarchy is combining with traditional patriarchies to
unleash even larger violence, both the kind we see on the streets of
Delhi and the economic kind, the violence of robbing you of your home,
of your foundation.

Our prime minister said recently, it’s these loose-footed migrants that
are part of the problem. Because the Delhi rape involved migrants at
both ends. The rapists were all living in slums in hugely brutalized
conditions, thinking that brutalization is the norm. The poor girl's
father had sold his land because farmers aren’t being allowed to make a
living. Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed
suicide. The rest are hanging on the margins of existence. He moved to
Delhi to load luggage at the airport to be able to survive and send his
children to school.

The prime minister just called them loose-footed migrants creating
problems. I said, “Mr. Prime Minister, they are a product of your
policies. They are refugees of your economic policies.” None of
these—economics and culture and society—are insulated silos. The
patriarchal economic model is becoming the dominant force in our
society. Societies have been reduced to the economy. Economy has been
reduced to the market. The market has been reduced to what is
controlled by finance, capital corporations. And if all you show is
women as commodities, selling other commodities, those images start to
further distort already damaged brains.

RM: Isn’t it amazing, Vandana, how when you put
something in context—the background of the victim and for that matter of
the perpetrators—it changes? Also, I'm reminded of your colleague
Ruchira Gupta who wrote a piece
in which she pointed out that the commodification of women by the
rampant growth of pornography and prostitution sends the message that,
in fact, this is what women are for. She connects that to the apparently
quite dramatic rise in rape in India.

VS: Hugely dramatic. Eight hundred percent since the
‘70s and more than 250 percent since India’s economy, was as they say,
made "more open" [with globalization]—more open to more violence against
women.

RM: From where I sit here in New York, it seems
heartening that women in numbers never seen before and accompanied by
men as well have been on the streets in not only Delhi but across
India. They haven’t quite made the connections you’re making, but they
are on the move protesting violence against women.

What can we do to turn the enormity of this around? It’s always for
example, blown me away, that a woman who is, say, in her fifteenth hour
of labor, straining away—the doctor and the nurses and the
anesthesiologists are all productive because they are wage labor, but
the woman who is actually giving birth is not considered in a productive
act.

VS: I think that is the foundational error. Everything
that replenishes is treated as not producing at all and everything
that’s degrades, everything that depletes, is treated as production. I
call it the creation boundary, which has given us the fiction of growth
and the Gross Domestic Product—that destructive acts are creative acts
of produce. The really creative acts of nature—of women in their
tremendous diversity and amazing ability to juggle 50 jobs, 50
responsibilities—their whole society and economy are treated as
unproductive. That, I think, is the most important shift we need to
make.

As you know Robin, I come from the part of the Himalayas where it's
recognized that women are the main productive force. They go out in the
forests [to work] and there's nothing like the rape [that occurs] when
you come into the plains where women are no longer considered
productive. When I, with my sister, Dr. Meta Shiva, was studying female
feticide, we realized that the map of high growth in the patriarchal
measure are the same zones with the high levels of extermination of
girls—fifty million girls haven't been allowed to be born in the last
few decades.
The response in Delhi is beautiful for a number of reasons.

The first, that the younger generation has come. The younger generation
was absent from social movements, especially the middle class because
they were getting it so good with globalization—the IT jobs that moved
to India. They were all seeing themselves as individual consumers, so
society did not matter to them. But this rape reminded them that it
could have been them coming back from their IT farms, from their phone
call service centers.

The second difference is, while we have had a feminist movement in
India for a long time, it was only the women. The beauty now is, young
men joined. It was a young man who was defending this girl in that bus.
I think for the first time, there’s this new generational solidarity
that’s emerging. Those very gutsy young people who are being beaten up
and sprayed with tear gas and water canons realized that the state has
become militarized. The state itself is a patriarchal institution. It
will take time. There will be the hysterical voices saying death
sentence, death sentence! But new connections have started to germinate
that are really going to make a serious change.

RM: That’s very encouraging. When you look at the
global scale of things, I confess that I look to women not only because
we are the majority and that permits more peaceable and more, how shall I
say, witty and ingenious new strategies, but also because there’s no
area that isn’t a women’s issue. We spill over into everything if the
connections are made. I definitely see the global women’s movement as
the politics of the 21st Century.

VS: We are really living through a period of collapse
of all kinds in the patriarchic system. The collapse of the financial
economy they’ve built, a collapse of the eco-systems they have raped.
The UN has recognized that 90 percent of eco-systems are on the verge of
collapse, if not already collapsed. In this period, it’s the creative
principle which women bring to bear for the simple reason that they were
left to look after the real stuff of life, the goals that really
mattered. So they bring both another world view, another mindset, and
other capacities, other skills—which is why I run a grandmother’s
university at the new school I created in Dehradun called the Earth University.

RM: I love it.

VS: Ghandi always said a prayer, “Make me more
womanly.” If there is going to be a future for humanity, it will have
to be a womanly future. I go to Europe and young men will bring me my
books [to sign] and say, "I'm an ecofeminist, Dr. Shiva." That to me is a
major, major shift. A shift to a creative economy where women start
defining and playing the leadership role but others recognize that there
has to be a mind shift.

RM: Whenever I talk to you, I feel both incredibly
depressed because one is made yet again to realize the severity of the
situation and at the same time, incredibly optimistic because I get from
you a validation of everything that we’ve been trying to do and will do
more and even better and with more people involved in the future.

I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your wisdom and your perceptions and for everything that you do.

VS: And Robin, I want to thank you for your vision and leadership and your love.